Iraq

Iraq is a country in Asia.

Two big rivers flow through it. Their names are the Tigris and the Euphrates. Iraq has flat farmland, deserts and snowy mountains. The capital city is called Baghdad.

Iraq is a country in the Middle East, in southwest Asia. Long ago, the land between its two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, was called Mesopotamia, which means "land between the rivers." Some of the world's earliest cities were built there.

Iraq has a wide, flat river plain in the middle and south, dry deserts in the west and south, and high mountains in the northeast. It touches the sea only at a short strip of coast on the Persian Gulf. About 46.1 million people were counted in Iraq in 2024, and the capital is Baghdad, on the Tigris.

Iraq lies at the eastern edge of the Arab world, at about the latitude of the southern United States, and covers some 437,000 square kilometers. Britannica divides it into four regions: the alluvial plains of the center and southeast, covering more than 132,000 km² or almost a third of the country; Al-Jazirah, an upland between the Tigris and Euphrates in the north; deserts in the west and south, some 168,000 km² or almost two-fifths; and the highlands of the northeast, about a fifth.

The modern state was created after World War I from the Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul, and its name comes from a medieval Arabic term for the region. Iraq's 2024 census, its first in nearly 40 years, counted 46.1 million people, according to final results announced in February 2025. With only 58 km of coast on the Persian Gulf, Iraq has the least access to the sea of any Middle Eastern state, followed by Jordan.

Baghdad is the capital city.

It is on a big river. At Babylon there are old city walls and gates. In Samarra a tall tower winds round and round, like a spiral.

Baghdad, the capital and largest city, stands on both banks of the Tigris. It was founded in 762, and for the next 500 years it was the most important center of culture in the Arab and Islamic world. The Iraq Museum there holds a large collection of ancient objects.

About 85 kilometers south of Baghdad lie the ruins of Babylon, with its old walls, gates and palaces. North of Baghdad, the ruined city of Samarra has a famous spiral minaret, a tower from the 800s. In the far south stand the mud-brick ruins of Ur, one of the early cities of Sumer. Mosul, in the north, is Iraq's second-largest city.

Baghdad lies on the Tigris about 530 km from the head of the Persian Gulf, in the heart of ancient Mesopotamia. Founded in 762 as the capital of the Abbasid caliphs, it was for 500 years the most significant cultural center of Arab and Islamic civilization; its importance waned after the Mongol conquest of 1258, and it regained prominence as the capital of Iraq in 1920. The Iraq Museum, founded in 1923, holds a major collection of antiquities.

Babylon, 85 km south of Baghdad, was the capital of the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 626 to 539 BCE; UNESCO inscribed its walls, gates, palaces and surrounding farmland in 2019. Samarra, 130 km north of Baghdad on both banks of the Tigris, was an Abbasid capital for a century; its 9th-century Great Mosque and spiral minaret stand on a site of which 80 percent remains unexcavated (inscribed 2007). Ur, Uruk and Eridu, Sumerian cities of the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE, were inscribed with the southern marshes in 2016. Mosul, beside the ruins of Nineveh, is Iraq's second-largest city.

Two big rivers bring water to Iraq.

Farmers use the water to grow food. Summers are very hot and dry. In the north, snow falls on the mountains.

The Tigris and the Euphrates both begin in the mountains of Turkey, far to the north. They flow across Iraq and join near the town of Al-Qurnah to form one river, the Shatt al-Arab, which runs into the Persian Gulf. In the south there are wide marshes, wetlands full of reeds and water.

Summers on the plains are very hot: in Baghdad, July and August average about 35 °C, and no rain falls from June to September. In the northeast, mountains on the border with Iran rise above 3,600 meters. They can get more than 1,000 millimeters of rain and snow in a year, but little rain falls there in summer.

Both rivers rise in the Armenian highlands of Turkey; the Tigris flows 1,417 km and the Euphrates 1,212 km through Iraq before joining near Al-Qurnah to form the Shatt al-Arab, which runs another 109 km to the gulf. The Tigris receives the Great Zab, Little Zab and Diyala from the Zagros, may carry more than two-fifths of its annual flow from March to May, and has flooded often; the Euphrates, with roughly 50 percent more flow, receives no large tributaries in Iraq. Dams and canals control floods and feed irrigation, and salinity, partly from over-irrigation, affects about two-thirds of the land.

The lowlands have two seasons: a dry summer from May to October, when Baghdad's July and August days average about 35 °C and 51 °C has been recorded, and a mild winter; the lowlands receive about 100-180 mm a year, nearly all between November and April. The northeast is cooler. Britannica names Ghundah Zhur, 3,607 m, on the Iranian border as the highest point, while Wikidata lists Cheekha Dar at 3,611 m; these mountains may receive more than 1,000 mm, much as snow. A dry northwesterly summer wind, the shamal, blows across the country, and dust storms occur in most months.

Many birds live in Iraq.

Flocks of water birds spend the winter in the marshes. Otters live in the marshes too. Foxes and wolves live in Iraq as well.

Birds are the easiest wild animals to spot in Iraq. In winter, the marshes of the south fill with more than 197 kinds of migrating water birds. UNESCO calls two of the marsh birds, the Basra reed warbler and the Iraq babbler, endemic, which means they are special to this region.

On land there are wolves, foxes, jackals, hyenas, wild pigs and wildcats, as well as badgers, otters and porcupines. A desert antelope, the Arabian sand gazelle, survives in a few remote places. The rivers and lakes are full of fish such as carp and catfish. Date palms, dozens of kinds of them, grow all over the south.

Britannica notes that the lion, oryx, ostrich and wild ass have become extinct in Iraq, while wolves, foxes, jackals, hyenas, wild pigs, wildcats, martens, badgers, otters and porcupines remain, and the Arabian sand gazelle survives in remote desert. Carp, Barbus species, catfish and loach stock the rivers. In the 1990s two large canal schemes drained about nine-tenths of the southern marshes, once the largest wetland system in the Middle East; parts were reflooded in the early 2000s.

UNESCO describes the Ahwar of Southern Iraq, inscribed in 2016, as one of the world's largest inland deltas in an extremely hot, arid setting: a wintering ground for more than 197 species of migrating water birds, a staging point for ducks and a major stopover for shorebirds, and a route for fish and shrimp that migrate in from the gulf. Endemic birds include the Basra reed warbler and the Iraq babbler, and the marshes shelter a subspecies of the smooth-coated otter and the endangered Euphrates softshell turtle. The Huwaizah Marshes, never drastically drained, became the main refuge from which many birds spread back.

About 46 million people live in Iraq.

Many people speak Arabic. Many people in the north speak Kurdish. Farmers grow wheat, rice and dates. Lots of people love football.

About 46.1 million people were counted in Iraq in 2024. Roughly two-thirds are Arabs and about one-fourth are Kurds, who live mostly in the mountains of the north. Smaller groups include Turkmen, Assyrians and Armenians. Arabic is the official language, and Kurdish is official in the Kurdistan Region in the north.

Farmers grow wheat, barley, rice, vegetables and dates, and raising animals for milk, meat and wool is common, especially among the Kurds of the northeast. Poetry thrives in Iraq, and traditional crafts include leather, copper and carpet work. Football is the national passion: Iraq's team won the Asian Cup in 2007.

Britannica estimates that roughly two-thirds of Iraqis are Arabs and about one-fourth Kurds, with smaller communities of Turks, Turkmen, Assyrians, Lur and Armenians. More than three-fourths speak Arabic, the official language, and roughly one-fifth speak Kurdish, an Indo-European language that is official in the Kurdish autonomous region; Turkmen and Syriac are also spoken. Iraq is predominantly Muslim, with the two major branches more equally represented than anywhere else: about three-fifths Shi'i and two-fifths Sunni. Shi'i pilgrims visit shrines at Karbala and Najaf. In federal Iraq about 70.2 percent of people live in urban areas, and in the Kurdish region 84.6 percent, according to the 2024 census.

About one-eighth of the land is arable: winter wheat and barley are rain-fed in the north and northeast, while the river valleys need irrigation all year. Chief crops include barley, wheat, rice, vegetables and fruit, and Iraq was once the world's largest date producer. Twentieth-century Iraqi poets such as Nazik al-Malaika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab are known across the Arab world, and Iraq's football team won the Asian Cup in 2007.